Colin Blakemore
Sir Colin Blakemore was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was Yeung Kin Man Professor of Neuroscience and senior fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at City University of Hong Kong. He was a distinguished senior fellow in the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a past Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council. He was best known to the public as a communicator of science but also as the target of a long-running animal rights campaign. According to The Observer, he was both "one of the most powerful scientists in the UK" and "a hate figure for the animal rights movement".
Early life and education
Blakemore was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire on 1 June 1944, the only child of Beryl Blakemore and Norman Blakemore. At the time, Beryl was a member of the Women's Land Army in England and Norman was in the Royal Air Force. When Blakemore was five, his father became a television repair engineer.Blakemore began his schooling at the local primary school, but after showing unusual promise, his parents sent him to a private school, King Henry VIII School in Coventry, where he excelled in science, art, and sports. Blakemore won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA degree in Medical Sciences in 1965, and was promoted to an MA in 1969.
Blakemore obtained his PhD degree in physiological optics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, as a Harkness Fellow in 1968. There he worked with Horace Barlow.
Career
From 1968 to 1979, Blakemore was a demonstrator and then lecturer in physiology at the University of Cambridge, and director of medical studies at Downing College. From 1976 to 1979 he held the Royal Society Locke Research Fellowship.He was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in 1979, at the age of 35. From this same university he was awarded a DSc higher degree in 1989. He was director of the James S. McDonnell and Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He served as president of the Biosciences Federation, now the Society of Biology, the British Neuroscience Association and the Physiological Society, and as president and chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now the British Science Association. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Institute of Biology, the British Pharmacological Society, the Society of Biology, and of Corpus Christi College and Downing College, Cambridge.
In 1981, Blakemore became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.
In 2012, he was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy's Centre for the Study of the Senses at the School of Advanced Study in London. He held an honorary professorship at the University of Warwick, and a professorship at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, where he was chairman and then external scientific advisor to the Neuroscience Research Partnership.
Blakemore was a patron of Humanists UK and an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. In July 2001, he was one of the signatories to a letter published in The Independent which urged the Government to reconsider its support for the expansion of maintained religious schools, and was one of the 43 scientists and philosophers who signed and sent a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair and relevant government departments, concerning the teaching of creationism in schools in March 2002. and was one of the signatories to a letter supporting a holiday on Charles Darwin's birthday, published in The Times on 12 February 2003, and sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.
Blakemore was honoured for his scientific achievements with prizes from many academies and societies, including the Royal Society, the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, the French Académie Nationale de Médecine, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the BioIndustry Association and the Royal College of Physicians. In 1993, he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine and in 1996 won the Alcon Research Institute Award for research relevant to clinical ophthalmology. He held ten Honorary Degrees from British and overseas universities and was a foreign member of several academies of science, including the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of India, the Indian Academy of Neurosciences, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He won the 2010 Royal Society Ferrier Award and Lecture. In 2001, he received the British Neuroscience Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience, and in 2012 the Ralph W. Gerard Prize, the highest award of the Society for Neuroscience. He chaired the Selection Committee for The Brain Prize of Grete Lundbeck's European Brain Research Prize Foundation, the world's most valuable prize for neuroscience.
Blakemore first visited China in 1974, during the Cultural Revolution, and collaborated in research at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His efforts to develop scientific relations between the United Kingdom and China were recognised in 2012 when he received the Friendship Award, the People's Republic of China's highest award for "foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country's economic and social progress". In 2012 he was appointed a Master of the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy.
Research
Blakemore's research focused on vision, the early development of the brain and, more recently, conditions such as stroke and Huntington's disease. He published scientific papers and a number of books on these subjects.His contribution to neuroscience included his role in establishing the concept of neuronal plasticity, the capacity of the brain to reorganise itself as a result of the pattern of activity passing through its connections. in the late 1960s Blakemore was one of the first to demonstrate that the visual part of the cerebral cortex undergoes active, adaptive change during a critical period shortly after birth, and he argued that this helps the brain to match itself to the sensory environment. He went on to show that such plasticity results from changes in the shape and structure of nerve cells and the distribution of nerve fibres, and also from the selective death of nerve cells.
Although initially controversial, the idea that the mammalian brain is 'plastic' and adaptive is now a dominant theme in neuroscience. The plasticity of connections between nerve cells is thought to underlie many different types of learning and memory, as well as sensory development. The changes in organisation can be remarkably rapid, even in adults. Blakemore showed that the visual parts of the human cortex become responsive to input from the other senses, especially touch, in people who have been blind since shortly after birth. After stroke or other forms of brain injury, reorganisation of this sort can help the process of recovery, as other parts of the brain take over the function of the damaged part.
Blakemore's later work emphasized the variety of molecular mechanisms that contribute to plasticity and identified some of the genes involved in enabling nerve cells to modify their connections in response to the flow of nerve impulses through them. He summarised research on brain plasticity in his 2005 Harveian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians and explored the role of plasticity in human cultural evolution in his 2010 Ferrier Lecture at the Royal Society. He served on the editorial board of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.
Public engagement and public service
In parallel with his academic career, Blakemore championed the communication of science and engagement with the public on controversial and challenging aspects.In 1976, at the age of 32, he was the youngest person to give the BBC Reith Lectures for which he presented a series of six talks entitled Mechanics of the Mind.
He subsequently presented or contributed to hundreds of radio and television broadcasts. He gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1982–3, and wrote and presented many other programmes about science, including a 13-part series, The Mind Machine on BBC television, a radio series about artificial intelligence, Machines with Minds, and a documentary for Channel 4 television, God and the Scientists. He wrote for British and overseas newspapers, especially The Guardian, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph and The Times. He also wrote or edited several popular science books, including Mechanics of the Mind, The Mind Machine. Gender and Society, Mindwaves, Images and Understanding and The Oxford Companion to the Body. Since 2004 he was Honorary President of the Association of British Science Writers.
In 1989, when Blakemore was awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for his work in public communication, the citation described him as "one of Britain's most influential communicators of science". He won many other awards for his work in public communication and education, including the Phi Beta Kappa Award for contribution to the literature of science, the John P McGovern Science and Society Medal from Sigma Xi, the Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh Council and the Science Educator Award from the Society for Neuroscience.
Blakemore worked for many medical charities and not-for-profit organizations, including SANE, the International Brain Injury Association, Headway, Sense, the Louise T Blouin Foundation, Sense about Science and the Pilgrim Trust. He was president of the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Brain Tumour Charity, vice president of the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy Association and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.
He helped the Dana Foundation of New York to establish the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, an alliance of leading European neuroscientists who are committed to raising awareness of the importance of brain research. A large donation from the Dana Foundation to the Science Museum completed the funding for the Dana Centre on Queen's Gate in London, which became a focus for public engagement with science.
He was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and an Honorary President of the World Cultural Council, a member of the World Federation of Scientists and a patron of Humanists UK. He was a patron of the Oxford University Scientific Society and an Honorary Member of the Cambridge Union Society.
Blakemore served in an advisory role for several UK government departments and also for agencies, foundations and government departments overseas. He was a member of the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones in 1999–2000 and was an advisor to the Police Federation and the Home Office on the safety of telecommunications systems. He chaired the General Advisory Committee on Science at the Food Standards Agency and was a member of the Wilton Park Advisory Council. He had a long-standing interest in policy on drugs of abuse, and was a Commissioner of the UK Drug Policy Commission, an adviser to the Beckley Foundation and a Trustee of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. He was an author of an influential paper published in the Lancet in 2007, introducing a rational, evidence-based system for assessing the harms of drugs, which suggested that alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than many illegal drugs. He was a member of the Longevity Science Advisory Panel of Legal & General, and sat on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press and served as a scientific advisor to the Technology Development Committee of Abu Dhabi.